The 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, passed away this week at the age of 100. Andy Borowitz had a simple, short statement about President Carter, and what he represented to the nation, and to voters, and contrasted it to what the Republicans keep offering us. The GOP seems to want to take us and keep us in a cesspool.
Munda’s Wandering Thoughts
After knowing one another for 53 years and being married almost 50, my wife still surprises and confuses me with some of her decisions.
I have no doubt that she’d say the same thing about me.
The Last Puzzle
I worked on a jigsaw puzzle throughout December of 2024. I started it towards the month’s start but don’t recall the exact date. Finished it last night. Sorry the photo is miserable.
I knew it’d be a challenging one. The stones, flowers, boats, and the myriad of background pieces would make it so. But I loved the scene. Reminding me of a few places I’ve been to, it invited me in.
I followed the regular routine. Edges first. Then I divided the tiles between sky, sea, boats, background houses, blue door, dark green shutters, cafe, plaza stone, bicycle. The pieces were put into baggies. I’d pour out pieces for the focal point I was working on and do that area. I started with the plaza but it frustrated me with its shadows and interlocking browns, rusts, etc. As it didn’t come together, I pivoted to the blue door and then the bike.
One major encumbrance to working on the puzzle is that there wasn’t a good photo of the completed scene. The scene’s bottom was cut off on the puzzle box front, and the birds were almost completely covered. While four views were offered, the other three were tiny. I looked the puzzle up online to get a good sense of everything after the first two days.
Between this one and puzzles done with friends, I worked on four jigsaw puzzles in December.
It was worth doing, and satisfying to complete. It’s still a place I’d like to visit. Have a little light lunch and glass of wine or cup of coffee and read a book, intermittently chatting with my companion as the water does its thing in the background…
Munda’s Theme Music
Mood: Timeflective
G’ mornin’, peeps of the online written word. It’s 2024’s final Monday, December 20, 2024. To celebrate, my other and I will go out for brekkie after she returns from her exercise class. Then we’ll do some groc shopping. Breakfast will be had at Crackin & Stackin in downtown Medford, I think.
It’s 33 F outside. Sunshine and clouds war again. Blue sky wins as the sun prevails. The ground is wet but drying for the moment after a few days of rain on a heavier scale and flooding in other parts of the county. No rain is forecast for the next two days. Today’s high will be 43 F.
I experienced vigorous, positive dreams last night and that’s put me in a solidly upbeat mood. Seeing sunshine reinforced it. Also contributing is that my foot/ankle are happier, and I had a lengthy solid if interesting writing outing yesterday.
Spoke with Mom on the phone last night. Says she’s feelin’ tired. Not surprising. Holidays always sap. Like many, it pushes her out of her comfortable returns. Now at 89, with several major health issues as part of her history, her energy is low, and every day is a new exploration of something in her body contending for attention. Her other, Frank, is doing great, she said. He’ll be 95 next month.
However, one of my younger sisters now has the flu. She is the Trumper who has had COVID three times. Believe she vaccinated before but she reportedly has underlying lung issues. She won’t tell anyone deets so we rumble about what it is. Her husband, a year younger than moi, went through open heart surgery a few years ago and is now dealing with kidney stones.
One of my other younger sister’s boyfriend lost his brother. But 66 years old, the man had a stroke and then a heart attack. Home alone while his wife was away visiting family in another state for the holidays, he was found on the kitchen floor after a day. Rushed to the hospital, he was pronounced dead and was removed from life support. He passed away yesterday morning.
Meanwhile, the boyfriend himself went into the hospital Friday for some scans after he complained about feeling ill and not breathing right. Turns out that he was experiencing congestive heart failure a 56 years old, astonishing us all. He’s 56 and is a regular runner. Those who saw him on Christmas thought he looked healthy and fit. It’s the way of life, I guess.
All that news and subsequent thinking gave permissions to The Neurons to introduce Joni Mitchell into the morning mental music stream (Trademark aging) with “The Circle Game”. A simple song, very poetic.
Coffee downed, here we go, putting another Monday into the books. Have the best you can, right? Don’t know how the next day will change your expectations.
Here’s the music. Cheers
Sunda’s Wandering Thoughts
I’m currently contemplating making arrangements for my wife and I to go the the Oregon coast for a break. You know the thinking: get away from it all. Take well-deserved time out from the usual routines. My injuries and medical matters curtailed many of our travel plans this year. Beyond that, the burden of caring for me, cleaning the house, and well, doin’ everything, was shoved onto her shoulders for several weeks. She held up well but she could use some downtime.
The thing is, it’s winter. Snow could come at any time. And we’d be driving through the mountains, often on winding two-lane highways. She no like. As a naturally anxious person, travel heightens her anxiety. Blend in additional risks like driving on snowy, icy weather, and she’s hanging over the edge.
In that way, she’s my polar opposite. I’m a calm and relaxed traveler and driver for most of the time, taking things as they come. When driving, I do get impatient with other drivers and vehicles. I allowed the impatience to take over when I was middle-aged. Now, I gently coax it back into its shell.
So I’m up in the air about what to do. Stay or go. Probably plan it and make reservations, and then buy the cancellation insurance in case the weather is too daunting.
Sa’day’s Wandering Political Thoughts
It’s a gloooommmy glooommmy day here. All rain and descending swirling fog. We’re getting less of it up by my home but the weather down toward the valley floor is icky yuck wet, as a meteorologist would say.
Daily Kos delivered a bright ray through the gloom. Furious Democratic Rep COMPLETELY NUKES Trump’s “Modern McCarthyism” They’re talking about Rep. Melanie Stansbury, NM-D, and her magnificent comments about JD Vance’s bill. As Rep. Stansbury highlights, the bill essentially creates a blacklist of who can’t work for the Federal government, based on their perceived loyalty to PINO-elect Trump.
“Welcome to the new House Committee on Un-American Affairs and the new McCarthyism,” she said. “We have arrived here today with this bill.”
The bill has the support of the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind the notorious Project 2025 policy plan — which issued a letter of support, Stansbury noted.
Led by Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation, supported by Trump and his MAGA base, the United States is goose-stepping back into less free, less democratic times. We’ve been led down this path before. The attached video (same one from Daily Kos) has part of Edward R. Murrow’s editorial about McCarthyism in it.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
We can substitute Trump or MAGA or Project 2025 or the Heritage Foundation or the GOP for ‘Senator McCarthy’. The policies they pursue and the campaigns they use fit McCarthy’s brand of divisiveness, political repression, and fear-mongering.
Good to know that individuals like Rep. Stansbury has our backs.
The Writing Moment
I entertained myself over the last few days with novel writing. Unexpected directions and ideas were advanced. Muses introduced settings, characters, and moments I’d not anticipated.
Then, last night and this morning, panic. OMG, how does this all fit together? Some of it comes across as a little friggin’ nuts, as in crazy, insane, and maybe…cringe…ridiculous.
A brave contingency of being spoke up, trying to soothe me by reminding me, don’t worry, don’t overthink it, just get out of your own way and let it happen. This is good that you’re uncomfortable and nervous about what’s happening. They cited numerous writers who claim that if it’s going too well, it’s probably bad, ergo, feeling bad about progress is actually good.
Yes, sure, I try to accept that. Tell myself, swallow hard. Keep going. Don’t judge it until it’s done as one piece.
Easy for you to say, the neurotic doubters retort. Then all agree, let’s just go write like crazy, at least one more time. See where it takes us.
And away we go.
Frida’s Wandering Political Thoughts
Vagabond Scholar’s jon-swift-roundup for 2024 took me to perrspectives.com’s roundup:
Trump’s Top 10 Broken Promises on the Economy
This is an excellent summary of Trump’s promises before his first messed-up term. Then, as now, Trump belched out grandiose promises and grandly failed to meet any of them. Yes, those of us paying attention knew that going into 2024. Reading it in an orderly, fact-loaded page is a sort of emotional and intellectual comfort food for me. Kind of thing needed as we slouch toward Trump’s second term.
Of course, reading the summary also triggers my anger at Trump voters, minions, and enablers. They’re either so awfully cognitively impaired that you wonder who is dressing them, deliberately obtuse because the truth is an ugly, scary critter to them, or know that Trump speaks shit but delight in the chaos he generates, or finally (looking at you Musk, RFK Jr, any Kushner, and Vivek), are just base, greedy opportunists who care about nothing except making themselves more money at the expense of others.
Well, honestly, I think Trump was swept in on a toxic melange of all of those things. We’re already hearing about voting remorse, infighting, and exclamations of surprise and disappointment, and he’s not even in office. We’re also witnessing some crowing about how he’s already changing the economy and the world, with people acting like he’s already in office.
The latest infighting erupting is about tech right’s desire for more H1B visas. They cite a need for these because Americans are ‘too retarded’ for the work they need. The charge for these is being lead by those billionaires of bullshit, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
“If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win,” Musk wrote on X.
“I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk wrote in another post on Thursday. “Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.”
Ramaswamy, a first-generation US citizen whose parents immigrated from India, concurred with Musk while defending companies that look outside the US for labor, arguing tech companies hire engineers who were born outside the US or born to American immigrants because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” citing portrayals of smart students in TV sitcoms “Boy Meets World,” “Saved By The Bell” and “Family Matters” as evidence.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” he wrote on Thursday. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
Over in deep MAGAland, the reaction was predictably WTF angry. Isn’t the whole thesis of Make America Great Again predicated on Americans being the greatest but undermined by those pesky immigrants, immigrants are who not as great as Americans, who — reminder — are the greatest? Immigrants who are stealing ‘Merican jobs? And here are two MINOs — MAGAs in Name Only, Musk and Ramaswamy, calling for more immigrants.
And so the MAGA base that took Trump to power already begins eating itself and falling apart.
And PINO-elect Trump is not even in office yet.
Brace yourself: 2025 is going to be a wild, wild ride.
Frida’s Theme Music
Mood: Decembristism
It was a dark and gloomy night but dawn broke as a bright, sunshiny day. Rain clouds knifed in during the intervening hours between now and then, thwarting the sun’s stalwart efforts to give us light and heat. Today is Frida, December 27, 2024. We’re surfing a 54 degrees F day, which t’aint a bad temperatures. The winds that scoured us last night have retreated. A kittenish breeze teases the trees.
Dreams rocked my night. All of ’em were quite personally oriented. Awakening from them had me thinking long and hard about them and what they meant, if anything. That’s often the issue with dreams: any meanings which your brain could be sharing gets wrapped and warped by confusing elements. Do they mean something, or are they just neurons gaming your consciousness?
Ran into a friend this morning. Well, not literally; we encountered on another. We’d not seen each other since October. I may’ve mentioned in posts here that I had ankle surgery in October and then immobolized by the recovery process. He didn’t know that and wondered where I’d been. I presented him a situation précis, with the main point being, that’s life. Afterward, walking away, The Neurons brought up a Dire Straits fave of theirs, “The Walk of Life”, into the morning mental music stream (Trademark aging). I originally associated the song with sports, especially baseball. Listening more closely, I recognized that it was about someone singing songs, and several references to rock and roll songs are heard throughout. An interview with Knopfler, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist behind the song, later confirmed this. Now I associate the song with anyone trying to make good through strife, keeping on toward a goal. This is life; you do the walk.
Days of 2024 vintage are trickling away. 2025 is coming up like a full moon over the trees. Time to rock on one more time. Here we go with the music. Cheers
A Great Story
I read the attached Saturday Evening Post story this morning. One of my blogging friends linked to it. I think it was either Scottie’s Playground or Jill Dennison’s blog. Boh are awesome at spreading good news and interesting developments. I have a habit of reading a basic post, and then, if it’s linked to another story, opening the other story. Sometimes I read it right away, but it’s not unusual for me to pin it to read later, if my coffeemeter shows my energy is sinking.
The story is about a company called Ridwell. A father and son started it. They make the connection that’s missing in many communities about what to do about zombie trash. You may have some of it in your home. Plastics and batteries and other items that your local recycling center doesn’t take which you can’t throw away because of its environmental impact. Things which pile up becaus no one locally recycles it and you can’t do anything with it yourself. I know from my experiences and friends that we have this issue in Ashlandia.
The son’s concerns and the father’s innovation, community spirit, and inventiveness is what’s really inspiring. I’m contacting our city, Ridwell, and our recycling/trash company, Recology, to see if there’s someway for us to get connected with Ridwell as part of this chain.
Ridwell is set up for that. I’ve joined with 294 others in my local region of southern Oregon to find a way to make this happen.
Michael Seidel, writer 